344 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



August 



county, at the foot of Beckwith Peak. 

 Forest fires have been prevalent in the 

 district between Bayfield and PortWing, 

 in Wisconsin, practically the same ter- 

 ritory which suffered in May. A wide- 

 spread area of dry slashings offers a 

 favorable opportunity for the fire to 

 gain headway. A minor blaze near 

 Escanaba, Michigan, created a scare 

 among residents of that town as to the 

 safety of outlying buildings, but no 

 damage was done. The fires in the 

 Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico, 

 near Silver City, which, as stated in 

 our June issue, were extinguished, 

 broke out again during July. 



Some loss was occasioned lumbermen 

 in Maine by fires in scattered localities 

 during the last week of June. The 

 most serious of these occurred in Wash- 

 ington county, but through prompt ac- 

 tion on the part of State Land Agent 

 Ring serious damage was averted. 



Canyon, Blacksmith Fork at Toll Gate, 

 and also at Aqueduct Toll Gate, Jor- 

 dan River at the pumping plant, Rock 

 Creek at Duchesne, and on Logan River 

 at Smithfield and Hyde Park. 



Mr. E. C. Murphy, inspector of 

 stream-gaging work of the U. S. Geo- 

 logical Survey, is now in the flooded 

 district of Kansas making a careful 

 study of the causes and extent of dam- 

 age done by the recent floods in that 

 state. During the past year Mr. Mur- 

 phy has been making a careful study of 

 previous floods in this and other sec- 

 tions of the United States, the results of 

 which are contained in water-supply 

 paper entitled "The Floods of 1903." 

 This pamphlet will be ready for distri- 

 bution in the near future. In connec- 

 tion with this subject several gaging 

 stations have been established in the 

 flood district of Kansas in order to de- 

 termine the flood flow. 



Stream During the past two 



Measurements, months the stream meas- 

 urement work of the 

 U. S. Reclamation Service, which was 

 started in the early spring in the West- 

 ern States, has been extended into new 

 territory, which is being examined for 

 irrigation purposes. 



In Colorado new stations have been 

 established during June as follows : La 

 Plara River and Canal at Hesperus, 

 Laramie Canal at Glendevey, on the 

 Little Grizzly at Hebron, and on Mc- 

 Intyre Creek at Gleneyre. Aside from 

 these stations, surveys and measure- 

 ments were made on the North Platte 

 and its tributaries in North Park, Colo- 

 rado 



In South Dakota new stations were 

 established in connection with irriga- 

 tion investigations at Seim on Grand 

 River, on Indian Creek at Sanoma, and 

 on Moreau River at Bixby. 



In Idaho stations have been estab- 

 lished on various canals in different 

 portions of the state in order to deter- 

 mine the amount of water now being 

 used for irrigation purposes. 



Gaging stations were established in 

 Utah during April, May, and June as 

 follows : On Logan Creek at mouth of 



Hydrographic Albert I. Stiles and Le- 

 Aids. roy Hunter, hydro- 



graphic aids, have been 

 assigned to the field force of Engineer 

 George L. Swendsen, Salt Lake City, 

 Utah. Mr. Stiles is a graduate of the 

 Leland Stanford University, and Mr. 

 Hunter is a graduate of the Massachu- 

 setts Institute of Technology, Boston. 

 Both men have had considerable field 

 experience and will be valuable addi- 

 tions to Mr. Swendsen's force. 



In the The growth of planted 



Dakotas. trees in the two Dakotas 



will be studied this sum- 

 mer by a field force of the Bureau of 

 Forestry. Some little work of inspec- 

 tion has previously been done in those 

 states, but the possibilities of tree plant- 

 ing there are relatively unknown. The 

 country is high and level for the most 

 part, though broken here and there by 

 canyons and small streams. There is 

 less planted timber than in Nebraska. 

 The plantations are usually the work 

 of those who took up timber claims. 

 Unlike much of the planting under the 

 same law elsewhere, that done in the 

 Dakotas was generally not perfunctory, 



